Zucker, Joan-Ellen

ORAL HISTORY OF JOAN-ELLEN ZUCKER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 18, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview has been scheduled through the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is October 18th, 2012 and I am Don Hunnicutt in the BBB Communication Studio with Mrs. Joan-Ellen Zucker to take her oral history about her life in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We’d like to thank you Mrs. Zucker for coming to the studio today and giving your oral history. Would you please state your name and the date you were born and place of birth, please.
MRS. ZUCKER: Joan-Ellen Zucker. My maiden name was Jameson. I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, lived there about six weeks. I didn't like it so I left. What else would you like to know? The date was May 19, 1932.
MR. HUNNICUTT: May I call you Joan-Ellen?
MRS. ZUCKER: Please do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Frank Francis Anthony Jameson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you recall the date of his birth?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I don't. But it was probably I would say 1908, would probably be approximately.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where he grew up?
MRS. ZUCKER: Trenton, New Jersey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And his father's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: William.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about his mother's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Mary Ellen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you recall her maiden name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was Crawford.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And do you recall when your parent's married?
MRS. ZUCKER: My parents married in 1931.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they lived in New Jersey?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, they lived there very briefly and then they moved to Scarsdale, New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did they live there?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my parents were divorced when I was 4 years old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you live with your mother?
MRS. ZUCKER: I live with my mother in my grandparents’ home in Scarsdale, New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. ZUCKER: I have half siblings. I think of them as whole siblings, but my mother and stepfather had my brother, Bill, and I know I should have looked up these things. He’s seven years younger than I am.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That's fine. How about your father, what he did do for work?
MRS. ZUCKER: My father was a newspaper reporter. He worked for the Associated Press. He was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for covering the Lindbergh Kidnapping in New Jersey, which is an interesting fact.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Wow, very impressive.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall – what age where you when he was covering that?
MRS. ZUCKER: One.
MR. HUNNICUTT: One?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother? Did she work any?
MRS. ZUCKER: Not at that time. She did later.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your brothers and sisters, are they living today?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, now there are two sides of my family. Both my parents re-married and so I'm the only product of marriage one or A. B was my mother and stepfather, William Jennings, important because it is with him that I came to Oak Ridge. And my father married Linda Eder, and they had two children. So I have two siblings on each side of my family.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your education? Give me a little bit about your schooling before you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: I went to Edgemont School in Scarsdale, New York, through the sixth grade. Part of the fifth grade, I was in a school in Reading, Massachusetts. I came here at the end of sixth grade in March of 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you kind of describe what the dress code was for girls in those days when you attended sixth grade or so?
MRS. ZUCKER: Skirts, blouses, shoes and socks that showed and I really don't remember anything. In Scarsdale, I used to wear leggings to school. I had to wear them to school underneath my dress when it was – the bargain I made with my grandmother was if it went below forty, I had to wear these things and they were hideous and they itched. That's the main thing I remember about clothing growing up. It was the leggings I had to wear.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They’re made out of wool?
MRS. ZUCKER: They are wool and it turns out I am allergic to wool so I spent a lot of my childhood like this.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in school, did you enjoy going to school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Not particularly. I probably have some learning disabilities. I probably have some dyslexia. So school was very hard for me as a kid. I was always been told I wasn't working up to my capability and I had a lot of tutoring and I think I probably caused a lot of hair pulling on part of my family because I came from a pretty smart family and I was supposed to be a very smart person, so and I had some school problems to deal with.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your sisters and brothers at that time give you any grief over your --
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my brother was seven years younger, the next sister is eleven years ago, the next sister is sixteen years younger and the final sister was eighteen years younger. So they didn't get any grief about anything. Although my brother has certain feelings about me, he says that I made him wash dishes when he was seven and he's never yet forgiven me. That’s how it is with brothers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about coming to Oak Ridge. Why did you come and how did you get to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my stepfather emerged on the employment market at sort of the end of the Depression. We lived in my grandparent's home, jobs were hard to find.
He was a travelling salesman for Birdseye Foods and we laughed over the years that he probably should have stayed with them because at that point it was a fly-by-night little operation and covered three Northeastern States and we all know what happened to Birdseye, right? So anyway, he got a job at – working for Remington in Massachusetts, and after that he went to Columbia, as did many people to take special training to come to Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what training he took?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, he went to Columbia for maybe a couple of months, I think, in New York City because he came here during the secret time of Oak Ridge, none of us knew what he did. I don't think to this day any of us – I have a very clear picture of what he did. He ended up doing estimating and he was a safety engineer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your stepmom or – is this your mother or your stepmother?
MRS. ZUCKER: My mother was a – I came to Oak Ridge with my mother and stepfather. My father and stepmother lived that time in – well, they weren't married yet. But when they got married, they lived in New York City.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you came to Oak Ridge how did you arrive? Would you come by car or train?
MRS. ZUCKER: We came by car with all our worldly goods and a dog and my baby brother. And I do remember that trip because it was very hard in those days to find places to stay on the roads and we drove from Scarsdale, and I remember looking for a motel and motels were all little tiny sort of shack like structures, and I remember the night we spent in a hotel, all in one room wondering why we were coming to Oak Ridge. What was this about?
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were eleven years old at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And when you got Oak Ridge, where did you live?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we were lucky we moved right into a D house on Cedar Lane. Interestingly, it is now occupied by a friend of mine, Connie Smith, and recently I went back to that D house, and it was really fun to see how the land around it had changed.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you’re referring to D house, can you tell me what that means? What that is?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, it was built by the government specifically for people who lived in Oak Ridge. We had – a D house is three bedrooms and we had one bathroom. Some D houses had two bathrooms. We did not, but so the – when my sister was born, what was supposed to be a bathroom turned into her nursery. Our house overlooked a steep hill and there were no trees on the hill at all. It was all a mud slide, which meant that I can put my baby brother on a piece of cardboard, went down the hill and sent him flying and it was a great sport, which we both remember well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was this the first occupants of the house?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, it was brand new?
MRS. ZUCKER: Brand new.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the year that was?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was March of 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you want to come to Oak Ridge or – I know you didn't have a choice, but really did you – what was your thought about coming to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, you know the big transition for me was going from being child of divorce, which in those days was not that usual and to becoming a member of a full household with a mother and a father and a dog and a baby brother. And so our major move was here as a family unit, and so there were some very exciting about being a family unit for the first time. So in that sense I was ready to go someplace. Leaving my grandparents was excruciating because I had grown with them, they were like my parents, always lived in their house. That was very hard, but of course I went back all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The neighborhood that you first moved in to on Cedar Lane, where there are other children in the neighborhood you recall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Lots, lots of children. Actually, the Cedar Lane was not quite finished when we moved there. There were still houses being built and I remember the first summer you could hear the noises of construction all around. I think within a month, all the houses were complete. But I just remember lying in the bedroom and listening to – waking up in the morning to sounds of construction every place, very different from Scarsdale, New York. Scarsdale, New York is a bedroom community for the city, very old New England kind of town and old homes, old trees, old streets, old people. In Oak Ridge everybody was young. Everything was raw so it was very different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the mud they talk about?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure. Everybody remembers the mud. My mother cried for I think six weeks after we got here, wondering what she was doing here, but she was always a good sport – and she rallied. I think we kids thought it was sort of a crazy adventure, but I have one mud story. I’m not going to tell anymore, but my mother for a Thanksgiving; everything was rationed so she learned that you could get turkeys in Knoxville. So, she took a bus to Knoxville with a couple of friends. They went some place to get a turkey. The only turkey was a giant turkey and the only bus stop was at the bottom of a steep hill covered with mud. So my mother used to tell a story and all the neighbors tell the story of the day my mother took this giant turkey and dragged it up this hill. So when we got the turkey it was completely encased in mud, but somehow we cleaned it up and we ate it. That was our mud story. It was my mother and the turkey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s a great story. What was the first school you attended?
MRS. ZUCKER: I attended Glenwood for just a couple of months.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then where did you go?
MRS. ZUCKER: Then we were moved to Elm Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What grade was that at Elm Grove?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the last few months of sixth grade I spent at Glenwood and then seventh grade was in Elm Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of your teacher's names?
MRS. ZUCKER: I do. I do. My main room teacher was called Maybell Stratton and she came from Strawberry Plains, Tennessee. And Alice Lyman was my music teacher. Well, that's all I can remember; that's enough. You remember Alice Lyman, that's enough.
MR. HUNNICUTT: She's an icon in the city of Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: She was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you stayed at Elm Grove School through this?
MRS. ZUCKER: Just for seventh grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Seventh.
MRS. ZUCKER: And we moved to Robertsville, to Jefferson, sorry – you know how they’ve all got mixed up. We moved to Jefferson which is where Robertsville is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you live? Did you move out of Cedar – no, you went to what we call Junior High School in those days?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: But you still lived on Cedar Lane?
MRS. ZUCKER: I lived on Cedar Lane until I graduated from high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the school at Jefferson. It was the old Wheat School at one time.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you recall it looked at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Before we got there, let me just say that all of my time in Elm Grove was spent in a portable house. The school wasn’t big enough for the population. So I went to school in a pre-fab and the whole school lot was lined up with pre-fab’s and each was an individual class. But Jefferson, well Jefferson was a great experience I must say. It was people from all over the world, all over the country, lots of different kids, lots of different kinds of thoughts and process. I think I'm a potter now and I first experienced the joy of art there with a teacher named Fannie Brennan. So, Jefferson was a lot of fun. We had a football team of sorts, I got into. I was never interested in football so I can't give you any history, but we did have – we had plays. We had a chorus and I joined the chorus and I was in musicals. So, I think in some ways that an age where a lot of your future life is formulated. It’s a good age because you’re not cowed by the social structure when you're twelve and thirteen and fourteen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the dress for a girl that came to Oak Ridge from another city? How was the dress different or was it different when you went to school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I think it probably was because everybody who came to Oak Ridge was poor. You have to understand that my friends were not the children of scientists.
The scientists came. They were young. They had no children as yet or they had very young children. So my friends, I guess, what might be described as blue collar workers. They came from the mountains of Virginia, from the coal mines of Tennessee; from all around this region. So, they didn't have, you know, they had no money. So dressing was I'm sure very different than it would have been in Scarsdale, New York were everybody had money so I’m sure that was different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the clothes lines at the houses were the mother hung her clothes and gathering up the housewives and the social network?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure. I don't know if it was a social network. I remember hanging clothes out. I remember from my childhood in Scarsdale we had a rotating clothes line. I loved that. I could hang on it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what type of clothes line did you have when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't know, just something that went to a post in the back yard, which you hoped did not collapse because if it did collapse, it collapsed into mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you attach the clothes to the line?
MRS. ZUCKER: Clothes pens.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What does a clothes pen look like?
MRS. ZUCKER: I still use them. I still have wooden clothes pens and I used them to close the tops of cereal bags and roll them over and put a clothes pen on top and stuff it back in the box. So, you know. It’s a little wooden thing that goes like this, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Give me the approximate dates that you attended high school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I graduated in 1950.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And why you were in high school, where was it located?
MRS. ZUCKER: Above Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jackson Square being in the Townsite area?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes. I want to say something about it. I want to say something that I think is unusual and very nice. I made four girl friends in sixth grade in Elm Grove. Two of them have died, but we are still friends. They had been lifelong friends. We were lifelong friends in junior high school and high school. I don't know how many people actually have that privilege, but I still have those same friends and I really treasure that. I just had to put that in. It’s important.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up just a minute and talk a little bit about your mother’s role as a wife, housewife. What do you recall about her daily life when you weren’t at school and during the summer times and just what do you recall about daily life in the household?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, she had children who were spaced out kind of all over the place so my mother I think had – was somehow always attached to some child because she had one seven years after I was born and another sixteen years after so that – and she wasn't particularly good at that, but she did it and she did it as well as she could. She was a woman who should have had full time employment. She was a very interesting bright, well read, funny woman who was involved with everything civic that could be possibly – I think could get her out of the house. And I often think about that because I think in another era, she would have been a full time something, but she was – she wrote for the papers. She was – at one time, President of the State League of Women Voters. She was active in Planned Parenthood, went out and tramped the hills to bring, you know, reproductive information to people who were badly in need of it. And she was just a very activist person and I think she'd have been a happier person if she had had full employment and a profession of her own like many women of her age.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What newspaper did she write for?
MRS. ZUCKER: The Clinton Courier for many years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall her socializing with neighbors in the house?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, sure, sure yeah. Now, there was a lot of emphasis on drinking in Oak Ridge because it was prohibited so that made it terribly intriguing. So a lot of focus was on how you could get booze and where you could get booze in parties. I think parties featured more alcohol than any parties I've watched or experience since and I really see that the focus was there because of the prohibition. I mean it was big topic of conversation. There was a little white house down on the Oliver Springs Road. Everybody knew that. Everybody knew where they get booze. People from outside of Oak Ridge brought it in all the time. So, that was a larger part of socialization than probably was healthy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how they got the booze back through the gates?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, anyway they could. There was one guy at the Lab I remember had a specially fitted suitcase, but he finally got caught. But that's later history. I'm getting ahead of myself.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Very interesting. Back to your experience in high school, what clubs or if you’ve joined clubs, what were the clubs that you were affiliated with or groups? What did you do in high school, I guess, other than go to class?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I went to class as little as possible. I had a pretty bad track record. I used to go to the Public Library and read and one of the truant officers, I think he was called – used to come collect me for tests. We were good friends and he would just come to the Library door and go, “Joan-Ellen, back up the hill.” So, I was not very orthodox. I'm sorry, I just wasn't.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you went to the Library, were you referring to the Public Library in the city?
MRS. ZUCKER: Public Library.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where was that located?
MRS. ZUCKER: That was in the Townsite area. It was part of the Rec Hall, the Ridge Rec Hall and the Ridge Rec Hall was at – just across from what was then called the Guesthouse which is now called the Alexander or the Dump, depending on how you look at it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year – you told me before, but what year did you graduate from high school?
MRS. ZUCKER: 1950.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then after graduation, what was your education experience?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I went to Syracuse University, did not graduate. I went to summer school at Julliard School of Music in New York for summer classes. I got married. One of the things that was surprising in my life, I think, is that I got married and stayed in Oak Ridge which was not part of my life plan, I think, but I did. I went to work; I went to work for WATO, which was the only radio station in the region at that time, affiliated with a Mutual Broadcasting System, which meant it carried baseball games all the time. I think – all I can remember is the sound of Mutual Broadcasting having nothing but baseball. Probably that’s not true.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that that you and your husband got married?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we got married in 1953, and I went to work for WATO in 1952. So I was working in Oak Ridge when I met him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up a minute and talk to you about the city having been a gated city. What do you remember about that?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I thought it was wonderful because it was exciting. When you took a bus and you're twelve years old and you want to go out of the city and you have to have a badge and you get to flash a badge at a guy with a big belt and a gun; another badge. That was really good. I liked that. I suspect that without really fully understanding it, I benefited from the safety of Oak Ridge because we kids lived in the woods and we lived – we were sort of wild things all over town. When I would go from one place to the other, we always went through the woods. We always went through the board walks. We used to start – when we went to Elm Grove, we’d start at the top of California and work our way all the way to Elm Grove from two directions on boardwalks. And I'm sure people have told you about boardwalks, but they had a great sound. When you walked on a boardwalk you could hear kind of a rippling, interesting sound, and I still can hear – I mean, I can still have a memory of that sound. It was a lot of fun if you were all by yourself and needed to be moody and a teenager – they were great places for that, too. They had little bridges. They’d go hang over the bridges and watch, you know, the water. It was great. I loved living in Oak Ridge as a kid.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about riding the buses in Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: I rode the buses for fun. They were free and it was safe and so when I was about twelve years old, I just get on the bus and I ride them all over Oak Ridge. I’d ride from one end to the other and then I go through the terminal and then ride from the other end you know and you could ride for hours free. So I did that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the terminals that you’re referring to, where they were and the names of them?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was across from the hospital, the present hospital. A big, big terminal, lots of bus action, kind of exciting place for kid. I used to hang out in the ticket office because I had a friend there that I liked. And I have often claimed that I tried to integrate Oak Ridge single handedly. Coming from the North, I had never witness the kind of discrimination that took place in the South, and it really repelled me right away. I couldn't understand it and I couldn't stand it. So, I would try and sit at the back of the bus just arbitrarily and I remember a really devastating moment where somebody, a African-American lady came to me sat down next to me and said, “Honey, would you please not do this because when you sit back here you are threatening everybody's life.” And I remember bursting into tears and going home to my mother and saying, “How can this be? How can this exist in the world we live in?” And my mother who was a very egalitarian person with an incredible sense of fairness, I just remember all my talks with her were very – where she tried explained to me that life wasn't so good always, right? But, that was a devastating experience for me. One of my most poignant memories are being twelve years old on a bus was all the black people that had to go to the back of it and I couldn't get it. I still don't.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talking about the buses, do you remember that when you went from one bus to the other, you have had to transfer was that incorporated in those days?
MRS. ZUCKER: You know maybe, but I don't remember it. I just remember wondering from bus to bus, right? But, you know I was twelve years old, thirteen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when they had the gate opening to the city in March --
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you tell me a little bit by what you mean by that?
MRS. ZUCKER: So, what year was that, ’49, ’50? When was it?
MR. HUNNICUTT: ‘49.
MRS. ZUCKER: ‘49. Oh, yeah, I was in the parade on that day. I had – my boyfriend had a Model-A and we rode in that parade for the gate opening in his Model-A and that was a memorable moment.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where the parade started and ended?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I remember it went through Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend any of the events other than the parade that happened in that particular day; speeches on Blankenship Field?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, I probably attended all of them. Now, you caught me off guard. Is that when the Hollywood celebrities came?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh yes, I was well involved with that. I already – I was a kid, but I was already working for WATO part-time and I remember being at the Grove Theater when there was a cowboy and a glamorous lady named, I think, Marie McDonald, and they were all drunk and I remember somebody telling me to go out – Rod somebody was his name?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cameron.
MRS. ZUCKER: Cameron and I had go out in the back porch at the Grove, the Grove Center Rec. Hall and tell this guy that he had to come back up because he was supposed to do something, and I remember standing at the top of the steps and trying to explain to him and he had to get up because he was sitting down on the steps and he had to get up and get back wherever he was supposed to be on stage at the Grove Theater because that – the Grove Theater was the kind of the central place where a lot of Oak Ridge activity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe that was called the Oak Terrace.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the Oak Terrace was the Grove. The Oak Terrace was there and it had a ballroom and at some point when I worked for WATO, its offices were in there and there was a restaurant down below that everybody – it was kind of the only restaurant. I mean, it had actual table cloths, I think, which were untrue of any other place to eat in Oak Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the movie star Marie McDonald? Was she really as pretty as they said she was?
MRS. ZUCKER: I guess, yeah. She was a pretty lady. She too was mostly inebriated. So how beautiful can you be? I'm sorry, this is sounding like there was a lot of drinking in Oak Ridge and you know what there really was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, you had a young population in those days.
MRS. ZUCKER: And a young population and the Rec Halls are all worth talking about, I think because all the Rec Halls had different personalities and the Rec Hall that I hung out in was next to the Library because I lived in the Library and that was fairly staid. That had pool tables and it was a pretty good hang out. Kids could hang out there reasonably well. Some kids were better at it than others like me, but the other ones were – all had different characters like there was one I don't think most people even remember, which was across from the Playhouse, where the Playhouse is now which was then the Center Theater - Movie Theater. This was on the upper floor of the Rec Hall. I don't remember what it was called, and I don't think it lasted very long, but that was the second most dangerous place in town. That was where kind of people hung out that you didn't really want to hang out with. The most exciting place was probably Jefferson Rec Hall where the most partying went on and I remember going there and that was sort of like the wildest place, but probably wasn't that wild depends on whether you’re sixteen or not, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you sixteen at that time you visited the Rec Hall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure, a lot of us kids.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall them having bowling centers in the Rec Hall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bowling alleys, they were called in those days.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah I do. I think they did. Yeah, but they were really what the word is? The thing that was so great about Oak Ridge was that Oak Ridge was a very egalitarian place. People came from everywhere and there was almost no class structure. So you just were who you were and there was, you know, we never bothered to ask what parents did or who’s what lineage people had. It was just, you were all thrown in the same pot. Nobody had much money and I have always had – just that theory in mind. I think the people that came to Oak Ridge, the working class people who came to Oak Ridge came because they were poor often. They had very few skills. There were jobs that were available that weren’t available any place else and they had a real sense of adventure. So in a sense, I have always thought of the early Oak Ridgers as people of great spirit and great adventure and courage and I had a lot of admiration and still do for a lot of those people. Most of the people I went to high school with, parents had not graduated from high school. Many of them, a few had graduated from college I would say, but most of my friends parents had never been to college. All of my friends ended up going to at least graduating high school, most of them going on to college. It was a great social leap upward for a lot of people from Tennessee and Kentucky and Alabama, all around the city and I have always had a great sense of pride about that and about the people I think really made Oak Ridge the city it was. I married a scientist so I’m not knocking the scientists, but they were young and they were concentrating on their work and a lot of people I’m describing were making a community, except for the scientists, of course, because they made the cultural community, but it was just an exciting thing to see people bloom, you know. We were 70,000 people. It's a big city.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you visit the Skating Rink in Jefferson area?
MRS. ZUCKER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Not a skater?
MRS. ZUCKER: I am a non-athletic person.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about your experience working for radio stations?
MRS. ZUCKER: The radio station was the only other place of communication to disseminate information other than the Oak Ridgers. So it occupied a place in the town that I think would be hard to replicate now. It was a center of information. It was a center of activity. It was the voice of the community in many ways. When I first started working there as a teenager, I worked with a group of really creative kids and we did live broadcast. We did live broadcast of famous nobles. It shows you how arrogant we were, how presumptive we did with some of the adults to work with us like Ted Layman and Dave Jacobs, who worked there at the time and we produced dramas, radio dramas of one instance was Moby Dick. But he had guts enough to do that. I don’t know but you have to be dumb or young which we were probably both and I played the whale which meant I had a rubber tire that I ran through a bucket of water and when somebody – when Dave Jacobs would say, 'There she blows'. I will go with the water and I was the whale. So it was creative hub in many ways which is a little hard to imagine now because radio stations have zilch creativity now to do things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What time of the day was that program presented?
MRS. ZUCKER: Probably by the dark of night, I don’t know; Saturdays. I think it was Saturdays. Oh, Saturday mornings, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what radio station was that?
MRS. ZUCKER: WATO.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where were they located?
MRS. ZUCKER: They were located, there was a building called the Municipal Market building which is roughly in the area of the now defunct Downtown shopping center and we were in the back alley. One of our announcers used to call it between the green floor louver doors that entrance to the back alley and so we kind of lived in a parking lot underneath the building, underneath the grocery store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old are you at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Sixteen, seventeen, high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention a grocery store. Do you recall any other stores in that particular building?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, I do. That building had a grocery store. We were behind the grocery store. I think that's the only other – I don't know what else was in there. Maybe a used, maybe car repair place possibly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about a hardware store? Do you recall a hardware store being in that building?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, Jackson Hardware may have been there originally. It moved to Jackson Square. I don't know. I don't remember a hardware store. Although I love hardware now I probably didn't love it then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other events did you cover? You mention the gate opening celebrities in the radio programs?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't think I really covered that. I just was hanging around, you know teenage kid who loved the radio station. Later well, I left town, came back, went back to work for WATO, and then I had a more serious role and I was a disc jockey which I loved. I thought that was fun. Disc jockeys in those days actually selected their music and I used to spend as much time choosing music as I did playing it and I can remember sitting on the floor with vinyl discs all around me, trying to decide what to play and it was fun. It was interesting. So I did a program called 'Talk of the Town', which I later did on another radio station, which I later did on a television station.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of music did you play?
MRS. ZUCKER: The music of the ‘50s was pretty bad in general. So it was a scramble to find good music. I play a lot of jazz because I like jazz and I used to work with the – the salesman would come in to the radio station and they would bring in new records that they were pushing. So you’d sit down with the salesman and you’d listen to the records and you talked to them about the artist and play the ones you thought were good. And I do remember that one of the artists that I felt like I discovered which is not true of course, but I discovered his records and play them a lot which was Harry Belafonte, who at that time was doing Scarlet Ribbons and some very sweet music and a lot of his music was so empty that it was –although there was a lot of big band music still around and a lot of music orchestrated by groups like Mitch Miller.
I could sing a few for you, but I won't, but it was fun choosing music and I liked the record salesman; I knew two or three of them. I think it was called Payola because they always took me for lunch. I was poor so I liked that. That didn't mean I necessarily played the records they were pushing, but I liked the lunch. The lunch was always at Service Drugstore in Jackson Square, so high-end it wasn’t. It was not high-end bribery.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In Jackson Square, where do you recall Service Drugstore was located?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, if you’re looking up the hill towards high school, it was at the far left where Big Ed’s is, next to a theater, The Ridge Theater where, I think, you could get in for nine cents.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let's go back to the records. Describe what the records look like and what they were called?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I still have some, but just large vinyl discs, the ones that we used to get from the record salesman were large vinyl discs with the bands because the 45s hadn't come out yet. So we got these big records with bands on them and you had to land your needle on the right band hopefully at the beginning. And then, you had to be right here to pick the needle at the end. So you couldn't go to the bathroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you do that job?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I did that oh, probably a year or so, and then I changed my focus on went into news coverage. So I was the news director of WATO for about two years and I liked that job a lot, but that had a great many difficulties because there were no women news people anywhere. So women in those days in radio, read muffin recipes and you know they didn't do serious things like news or especially local news. So that was a struggle. It was a great struggle to win respect and I was never paid as much as any of the other males on the staff. I was roughly paid half. Now, by this time I was married and I was supported and I didn't have to bum lunches from record salesmen anymore, but it really was looking back on it. It really is painful still to think about it. I was the second member of Tennessee Association of Broadcasters because the first member had a name that started with D, and I started with J, otherwise I would have been the first. So, it was not a good time for women in the broadcast field and now I am so excited to watch two moderators on national debates who are women who are smart and who are completely capable of doing this terrific job and that brings me enormous pleasure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who the owners of the radio station was?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I do indeed. Sam Thrower. Let's see Marsha Pengrower, trying to remember his associate. Harry Weaver. Sam Thrower was the director was the – I guess, management was the right term. -- was a salesman. I could probably…well one of the people – there was some women actually employed in WATO and one of them was Ruth Jameson and my name was Jameson and I was not related to her at all, but our names were spelled the same way so that was always a mix up. So my radio name in those days was Joan Ellen which means people were always writing to me, Dear Mrs. Ellen, but it was the only way to de-confuse us and we did very different things. She was a terrific lady, but she was very focused on domesticity and I wasn’t. So, we were very different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned people would write to you about what? What was some of the notes they wrote to you about?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I did a program for commuters. My airtime was started at four and went to six every evening so I was on the commuter. And I got a lot of very nice little notes from men because I was a female on the air and that was something unique. And people wrote to request songs. People sometimes wrote if they liked the program. Usually they wrote more often if they didn't. Later, I worked for WOKE and we were piped in to Brushy Mountain and I used to get some really interesting mail from Brushy Mountain.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What is Brushy Mountain?
MRS. ZUCKER: Prison. It was a maximum security prison. So the guys from Brushy Mountain would write real nice notes like, “Honey, when I get out of here, I’m going to come to see you.” And that was kind of nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Probably you was hoping they wasn’t going to get out.
MRS. ZUCKER: I was hoping they wouldn't get out, and they didn't get out very often so that was okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Just touch a minute, so their audience would know, Brushy Mountain prison was located where?
MRS. ZUCKER: What is the town it’s was located on? Petros? Petros? Okay thanks. I'm getting cues over here. I started to say you drove this way and then this way you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At that time, what kind of automobile did you have?
MRS. ZUCKER: At which time?
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your first time automobile? Let's go there.
MRS. ZUCKER: Here in Oak Ridge?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we didn't have one at first. When we first moved, we didn't have an automobile for a couple of years after we moved to Oak Ridge. I don't know. I really don't know whether that was monetary or for some other reason we all rode the bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall going shopping with your mother to the grocery stores or stores that she went shopping?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I used to get put in line at Elm Grove Shopping Center when I was a kid and I would hold a place for my mother and until the lines – the lines were very long because everything was rationed especially for cigarettes, which everybody smoked then and so I would hold a place with the line and then call my mother from the payphone, or from the phone on the desk in McGinley’s Drugstore and she would then come down. This is after we had a car. She would come down and grocery shop, but you know she – it has a deal. I think I got paid like ten cents to do that, to hold the line for her and – well, all my friends did that too on Saturday morning so, a whole bunch of us – the people from the Elm Grove region. We would all cluster around on, you know, in front of the grocery store and wait until we got to the end of the line and you can take turns and read the magazines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Elm Grove the most frequent grocery store she visited?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You stood in line for?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, yeah. It was the closest to where we lived.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your mother went shopping or I presumed she took your sister?
MRS. ZUCKER: My sister was born when I was in high school. I don't know what she did with my sister. I carried my sister every place. I liked her a lot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Very interesting. Where did you meet your husband?
MRS. ZUCKER: On a double date here in Oak Ridge. By that time, my parents had moved to Norris. They moved to Norris after I graduated from high school. So when I met my husband, I was working for Miller's Department Store in Knoxville. He was working at the Lab and I lived in Norris. So what I remember mostly about our very brief courtship was that mostly we're in a car going like this from one place to the other.
I met him on a double date, but the first we were, became, I think, interested in each other was at an Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Coffee Concert in the Library, or in the Ridge Rec Hall. So, we had I think our first – the spark was lit at that point.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you work for Miller’s in Knoxville?
MRS. ZUCKER: A little over a year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your job duties?
MRS. ZUCKER: I was called Fashion Coordinator. I got the job because I was broke and I couldn't find a radio job and I knew a guy in Knoxville, who knew the guy in Miller’s, who got me this job working for – you saw Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada? Well, that’s the woman I worked for, and she was the Fashion Coordinator and they really hired me because I could write the fashion monologues and deliver them. So what I did was, you know, I was the speaker for a lot of fashion shows.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, how did you get back and forth from Norris to Knoxville?
MRS. ZUCKER: Carpool with other people from Norris. I used to eat breakfast in the drugstore. For thirty-five cents you can get two eggs, toast and coffee at the drugstore which I think was a –you know it wasn't a Drugstore, it was a five-and-dime down the street. And I also – some of my memories of Knoxville were kind of fun because we little girls used to dress ourselves if we were lucky from Lerner’s and Lerner’s, who was on Gay Street then. You could go to Lerner’s; you could get pretty cheap dresses that were pretty and cheap. So we would form a little group and go in by bus with our money to buy dresses at Lerner’s and I also took voice lessons from the only voice teacher that I know of in the region and she – her studio was right at the end of the old Market Square and so it had windows that opened up to the Market Square because nobody had air-conditioned and I would sing Italian songs to all the geezers out there selling, you know, fish and pork ears and whatever. And I can still remember all these guys kind of popping in their galluses and staring up at the thing and I could stand in front and wave while I sang like this so my voice teacher wouldn't see me. But, you know that was still on the days when they brought the produce in with mules. It was a neat place. I often think they missed the boat when they didn't somehow keep some of that feeling up. But, Market Square is still fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you play a musical instrument?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I was always interested in voice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you met your husband on a blind date; do you recall where that was? Where that took place?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, we went out on the lake. I was dating. He was dating the cousin of the guy I was dating and we all went out on his boat. My husband had just bought a boat so we went out on his boat. My husband always claims that he bought that boat in order to entrance women and he married the first one he ‘tranced. So that was kind – I don't know if he got his money’s worth. He got a long marriage out of that. We’re still married.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe he did well.
MRS. ZUCKER: Almost sixty years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where were the some places you went when you dated?
MRS. ZUCKER: Dated my husband or dated other people?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes. Well, let's go back to when you dated other people.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, there was a road house out on Clinton Highway called Patton [inaudible] and Patton [inaudible] was good because you could really dance there. It had good dance fans and so that was one of my favorite places to go. You could spend a whole evening I think you know one beer and a lot of dancing and I loved to dance. So, a lot of my dates, we would go to Patton [inaudible]. There wasn’t much place to go in Oak Ridge. I've always loved classical music so I went to a lot of concerts. I was, you know, I had been associated one way or another with the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Corp since I was sixteen and I'm still on the board. So, I mean like how long can you be trapped by one organization? But, I love classical music. I love live classical music. I love any kind of live music.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall a drive-in called the Snow White Drive-in?
MRS. ZUCKER: Of course, of course, we used to broadcast there. Ted Laymen did a live broadcast from the Snow White, I think, every Saturday night and he had a little booth there and he, you know, he fielded records. Ted is an interesting character and if you could interview him, you would enjoy that. He was very active in the Playhouse. As a kid, I took Junior Playhouse and I sang with the Oak Ridge Chorus. You asked about high school. I made jokes about it, but I think what I mostly did in high school was I did a lot of art work in high school. I decorated gyms. I decorated things. I had a lot of energy, not all academically directed, but I was very good at extracurricular – majored in it as a matter of fact, and I didn't belong to clubs because I didn't approve of clubs. So I actually made an enemy of the sororities because I didn't feel they should be able to use school facilities and at the same time black ball students so that made me very unpopular at times.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let's talk a little bit about some more about the Snow White Drive-in. You mentioned you broadcast from there. Describe what that drive-in looked like the best you can remember.
MRS. ZUCKER: Gosh. Garish lighting, an overly bright lighting like a Hopper painting, long metallic kind of counter with high chairs that – they may have been some low chairs and tables, but I don't recall it. I just recall the counter and big parking lot always full, orders taking at the car. It was the place to go in many ways. I mean even after my husband and I got married, it was still a place to go for breakfast. You know a Snow White breakfast was kind of a tradition. It was enormous and you know full of the good things that are bad for you. There was one lady I remember there. I don’t remember her name, but she was a kind of strong looking red-headed lady with the big loud voice and I wish I remembered her name, but she was kind of a fixture like at the Snow White and –.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was she the cashier?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't remember. I really don't remember. I used to go there and hand Ted Laymen records. You know and so my function usually was there was an abject to the radio station.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall around the ceiling perimeter where molding would go, there’d be Snow White and her little Dwarf pictures?
MRS. ZUCKER: Sounds right. You can't prove by me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I remember that.
MRS. ZUCKER: You remember that?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Okay, well I'm not going to argue with you. It certainly sounds like – I know it did have a big neon wrap around of some kind.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Snow White Drive-in is a kind of an icon in Oak Ridge. There's not any pictures of the drive-in.
MRS. ZUCKER: There are no pictures? How funny, gosh.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So I always ask about the Snow White to give information about how the Snow White worked.
MRS. ZUCKER: Right. Well, I just remember it was the grand social center of Oak Ridge for a while. For me, the center of Oak Ridge was often, I guess, Ridge Rec Hall because that was where I met some very interesting people there. For one thing, a lot of the people in Oak Ridge especially a lot of men, young men had been in the service and came back and we had a lot of people in the high school that were ex-service men especially the Navy because I think the Navy took people very young. So, we had people returning to high school that had been in World War II and right after we graduated in ‘50, a lot of our guys went to Korea so we were pretty involved with war. In high school, there was a group called, gosh, I wish I remember. It was a group focused on peaceful uses of the atom. I wasn’t a member of it, but many of my friends were and they were concerned about the future – this is after the bomb. They are concerned about the future of a world with these huge weapons. So, there was a very interesting group of young people there who were concerned about those issues. You know, the high school was quite a mix because it was a big football school. We had a lot of good teams and they were state champions in many ways. We had wonderful players like Buddy Pope and B.B. Hopkins were kind of notable players in the region, but we also had a great debating team and we also won of all kinds’ championships from music. Our chorus won a lot and I sang with the chorus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In 1945, I can't remember; were you too young to remember the dropping of the bomb in the celebration?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I actually was not here. I was in Nantucket Island when it was dropped, with my father. I always lived a double life because my parents – my father and his wife lived in urban areas. My father lived in Washington during World War II and so I went to Washington quite frequently during my youth and then I also went to New York quite frequently and then I went on vacations with that side of my family to a lot of Northeastern vacation spots so I was very lucky in that regard. I had a wonderful group of experiences that were totally separate from Oak Ridge. But I was in Nantucket Island on vacation and I can't remember exactly. There was a moment in my living room when somebody mentioned and somebody who shouldn't have mentioned something about making weapons and – a neighbor and my stepfather wrestled him out of the house really fast and walked him down the street and I don't remember anything more than that. But I did get the idea that we were making weapons. So my father who was a newspaper man came in and he said, “Something big happened in Oak Ridge” and I said, I don't remember this at all, but my father said I said, 'Oh, you mean they made that big bomb. The big bomb we made?” totally out of the blue. So my father was absolutely amazed. He thought I really knew something and I never disabused him because I like the idea of his thinking I knew something. So, I didn't really, you know I just had heard enough and I think although it was supposed to be super secret. I think there were very few people in Oak Ridge that didn't feel we were making weapons of some kind. Of course, nobody anticipated the horror of what we were actually making, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, let's switch forward a little bit about you met your husband and you got married. Did you have children?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, we had three. Yeah, we have three. We have three daughters: Rebecca and Claire and Susanna.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they went through the Oak Ridge School system?
MRS. ZUCKER: They did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when they went through the school system versus when you went through the school system, how different or was it different at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I think it was different. For one thing, they went through the school system with the children of other scientists. So I think they had a different social experience than I did. As I’ve I describe before, I think I went through school where a lot of people who were upwardly mobile, who had come from pretty impoverished backgrounds, who didn't have a lot of educational background, and I think our school was good and I think it was a huge effort was made to bring in the best possible teachers to Oak Ridge. So the educational opportunities for those people were very good, but the competition was very difficult. My kids went to a much more highly intellectually competitive school. They were up against really well educated kids from well-educated backgrounds who were already smarter than somewhat when out there, when they were born and so their competition was tough I think. It suited my children differently. I mean my children are different as are all children. So my artist child didn't have a very good time because there wasn't a focus on the kinds of things she cared about. My scientific child had a much better time, was better able to compete and my oldest daughter I think had a very good social experience because she was a very kind of sociable warm person. So they all had different experiences, but I think the schools became tougher, and certainly in some areas, and I'm just guessing, but I think they became a little more classified. I mean, I think that there was a little more gap when my kids went to school between the less fortified – the kids were less fortified at home than the kids who were more fortified at home, in terms of home stimulation. And I think there was a bigger class gap when my kids went to school than it was when I did. But all of my kids are glad that they grew up in Oak Ridge because all of my kids have said at some point or another that they like the mix of people, especially, I think, in housing.
I mean, if you look at an Oak Ridge street, growing up in the war, and even after the war, because of the differences in house sizes, what you got was a big mix of people and you know nobody could buy their way into big house when I was growing up. So you just kind of –although it is interesting that all the F houses, which are the largest houses seemed to belong to the Army brass. There was something going on there. I now live in an F house and it’s funny because I still think of it as an upper class house even though I live in old Oak Ridge. It’s because of my perception – this house I live in now was owned by Colonel Britain who was with, you know, one of the Army guys that ran Oak Ridge, so I looked at it – and I used to go there as a visitor when I was growing up. So I still think, you know, “Man, I've got an F house”, right? It's hard to explain that elite feeling to anybody else that just looks at it as a cemesto, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, when you first got married, what was your first house you lived in?
MRS. ZUCKER: We lived in the little apartments across from Downtown, the E apartments and then my husband first lived in the condemned apartments on Highland Avenue, and he wanted to get out of those so badly that he told the Lab if he didn't get a better apartment he’d leave. They got him a little bit bigger apartment, an E apartment. So we moved in there, and then we moved into a Garden Apartment like almost everybody we knew, started out in a Garden Apartment.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The first apartment was the brick apartment?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s still over there today. Then you moved to the Garden Apartment, did you live in the ones that faced the Turnpike, or did you live in the three story block ones behind?
MRS. ZUCKER: We lived in the three story block ones. We had the woods behind us, which was nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The first apartment, can you explain, or do you remember how it looked inside?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, yes. I think to this day it was a really well-designed apartment. They had black vinyl floors which were not great; kind of sank in when you walked in because it was so dark. They had a small, but very well-constructed kitchen. Still do, I'm sure. A living room-dining room combination, two bedrooms, a very spacious bathroom. In fact, when we could afford one, we put our washing machine in the bathroom. They had a basement cubicle where you could store things, except our neighbors used them to play poker because his wife wouldn’t let him play in the apartment. So he had it all set up for his poker guys and with couches. So, we all commandeered those for various purposes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Would you describe the Garden Apartment?
MRS. ZUCKER: That’s what I was describing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Oh, what about the Woodland brick?
MRS. ZUCKER: You know, we lived there a very short time. It was very tiny, small bedrooms, small living room, tiny little table. I don't even remember the kitchen, but I just remember wanting to get out of it. It was not a great place to live.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your children were born, where did you live?
MRS. ZUCKER: I live then and live now on Orange Lane, 103 Orange Lane. I've lived there since 1959, the same house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That's an F house?
MRS. ZUCKER: That's an F house. Much remodeled now, but still an F house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe what a F house looks like?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the F house was the biggest of the cemesto houses and originally, it had three bedrooms with a fairly large living room and a separated dining room and a screened porch and a long skinny kitchen which we got rid of as soon as we could and a utility room, one bathroom. We had remodeled our house many times and now it has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, three bathrooms, actually, a large kitchen with a room next to it. We call it a TV room, and a basement where my potting studio is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work during any of the time while you were married?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes. Well, I worked at the radio station and then I worked at the cable station; Tennessee cable station Channel 12 that preceded this Channel 12. I worked there for six years. I did all kinds of things, but I ran a television interview show. I was in the other seat, the one you’re occupying and I did a daily show for four and a half, almost five years. I don't know how I did that. It was so much work, but I had more energy then. I mean, I look back on it and I think, “My God, how did I do that every day?” Oh gosh, it was so hard – very rewarding. It was like I used to say it was kind of like a license to kill because so many interesting people came through my life that way. I made so many friends through that program and so many wonderful acquaintances. It felt like at that time in my life, I really understood my community. I don’t understand it that well now. I loved that job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Touch a little bit about what your husband's profession was?
MRS. ZUCKER: My husband’s a physicist. He immigrated to this country before World War II broke out from Yugoslavia because his life was in danger. So he and his family made it to New York as immigrants. He got into the New York City school system, went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a free school and a top school in New York. Got to the University of Vermont with a GI Bill like so many other really smart people in our society today and went to Yale Graduate School and then came here. He worked in the Electro-nuclear Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and became an Associate Director and then was, for brief time, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He's quite a guy. Great father; great grandfather; great, great, great uncle; great, great, three-greats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many grandchildren do you have?
MRS. ZUCKER: We have seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren and two great, great-grandchildren on the way, twins.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Does your children live in Oak Ridge or they –?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, one lives in Tucson, one lives in Asheville, and one lives in Knoxville.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you see the city of Oak Ridge today versus how it was when you came? How has it changed, in your opinion?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I’m very concerned about it and the most marked difference that I see, how do I put this? I'm disappointed in the fact that so many people have moved outside of Oak Ridge. You know, we all make jokes about the Pellissippi Parkway having destroyed Oak Ridge. People started to move out and as they moved out, I think, unfortunately, a lot of the people that care about the institutions I care about which are cultural institutions, they moved their interest in the culture to Knoxville. So, we have organizations that were founded by bright, young, you know, terrific people sixty years ago. Those same people are still trying to run those organizations because people who have the same concerns and interests are now living in West Knoxville. And that to me is terribly sad because we have institutions in this town now, that are just hanging on by the thread. I worked a lot with the Oak Ridge Symphony and Oak Ridge Civic Music Association, and to get young people to go to the concerts is difficult. It’s always been difficult. But the kind of young people we had in Oak Ridge sixty years ago started those institutions and now that kind of person is living in West Knoxville. So, I think that's sad, and I attribute some of my disappointment to a lack of energy in that direction by our employers. I, for instance, do not think Oak Ridge National Laboratory puts the same emphasis on city support by its employees. I'm not talking about giving money to things. I'm talking about supporting local institutions. I don't think there’s enough emphasis by the Lab put on, you know, your civic responsibility to the community that we have built here and that makes me sad. It really makes me very sad. I want to go out there and say, “Look, you know this a great place. We need to keep it great and your energy’s going in seven other directions.” So, I’m sad about that, and I’d like to do something about it, but you know, I'm a little old to do something about everything. When you get to be eighty years old, you have to say to yourself, “Well, do I want to start something new at this point or do I want to take a nap?” And the nap wins, two out of three times, right? So, you can't do it anymore and you shouldn't do it anymore. That's another reason. You know, I should be replaced on things that I've been doing. We should all be replaced. Replace me, you know?
MR. HUNNICUTT: It's been a great pleasure to interview you, and I think that this interview will be a help to a future person that might want to write a thesis or some story about Oak Ridge, but you've contributed a lot of information about Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: Thanks.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I thank you very much.
MRS. ZUCKER: It is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Thank you.
[End of Interview]

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ORAL HISTORY OF JOAN-ELLEN ZUCKER
Interviewed by Don Hunnicutt
Filmed by BBB Communications, LLC.
October 18, 2012
MR. HUNNICUTT: This interview has been scheduled through the Center for Oak Ridge Oral History. The date is October 18th, 2012 and I am Don Hunnicutt in the BBB Communication Studio with Mrs. Joan-Ellen Zucker to take her oral history about her life in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We’d like to thank you Mrs. Zucker for coming to the studio today and giving your oral history. Would you please state your name and the date you were born and place of birth, please.
MRS. ZUCKER: Joan-Ellen Zucker. My maiden name was Jameson. I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, lived there about six weeks. I didn't like it so I left. What else would you like to know? The date was May 19, 1932.
MR. HUNNICUTT: May I call you Joan-Ellen?
MRS. ZUCKER: Please do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your father's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Frank Francis Anthony Jameson.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you recall the date of his birth?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I don't. But it was probably I would say 1908, would probably be approximately.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where he grew up?
MRS. ZUCKER: Trenton, New Jersey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And his father's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: William.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about his mother's name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Mary Ellen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you recall her maiden name?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was Crawford.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And do you recall when your parent's married?
MRS. ZUCKER: My parents married in 1931.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they lived in New Jersey?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, they lived there very briefly and then they moved to Scarsdale, New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did they live there?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my parents were divorced when I was 4 years old.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you live with your mother?
MRS. ZUCKER: I live with my mother in my grandparents’ home in Scarsdale, New York.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you have brothers and sisters?
MRS. ZUCKER: I have half siblings. I think of them as whole siblings, but my mother and stepfather had my brother, Bill, and I know I should have looked up these things. He’s seven years younger than I am.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That's fine. How about your father, what he did do for work?
MRS. ZUCKER: My father was a newspaper reporter. He worked for the Associated Press. He was the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for covering the Lindbergh Kidnapping in New Jersey, which is an interesting fact.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Wow, very impressive.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall – what age where you when he was covering that?
MRS. ZUCKER: One.
MR. HUNNICUTT: One?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What about your mother? Did she work any?
MRS. ZUCKER: Not at that time. She did later.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Your brothers and sisters, are they living today?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, now there are two sides of my family. Both my parents re-married and so I'm the only product of marriage one or A. B was my mother and stepfather, William Jennings, important because it is with him that I came to Oak Ridge. And my father married Linda Eder, and they had two children. So I have two siblings on each side of my family.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your education? Give me a little bit about your schooling before you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: I went to Edgemont School in Scarsdale, New York, through the sixth grade. Part of the fifth grade, I was in a school in Reading, Massachusetts. I came here at the end of sixth grade in March of 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you kind of describe what the dress code was for girls in those days when you attended sixth grade or so?
MRS. ZUCKER: Skirts, blouses, shoes and socks that showed and I really don't remember anything. In Scarsdale, I used to wear leggings to school. I had to wear them to school underneath my dress when it was – the bargain I made with my grandmother was if it went below forty, I had to wear these things and they were hideous and they itched. That's the main thing I remember about clothing growing up. It was the leggings I had to wear.
MR. HUNNICUTT: They’re made out of wool?
MRS. ZUCKER: They are wool and it turns out I am allergic to wool so I spent a lot of my childhood like this.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you were in school, did you enjoy going to school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Not particularly. I probably have some learning disabilities. I probably have some dyslexia. So school was very hard for me as a kid. I was always been told I wasn't working up to my capability and I had a lot of tutoring and I think I probably caused a lot of hair pulling on part of my family because I came from a pretty smart family and I was supposed to be a very smart person, so and I had some school problems to deal with.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did your sisters and brothers at that time give you any grief over your --
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my brother was seven years younger, the next sister is eleven years ago, the next sister is sixteen years younger and the final sister was eighteen years younger. So they didn't get any grief about anything. Although my brother has certain feelings about me, he says that I made him wash dishes when he was seven and he's never yet forgiven me. That’s how it is with brothers.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about coming to Oak Ridge. Why did you come and how did you get to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, my stepfather emerged on the employment market at sort of the end of the Depression. We lived in my grandparent's home, jobs were hard to find.
He was a travelling salesman for Birdseye Foods and we laughed over the years that he probably should have stayed with them because at that point it was a fly-by-night little operation and covered three Northeastern States and we all know what happened to Birdseye, right? So anyway, he got a job at – working for Remington in Massachusetts, and after that he went to Columbia, as did many people to take special training to come to Oak Ridge.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall what training he took?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, he went to Columbia for maybe a couple of months, I think, in New York City because he came here during the secret time of Oak Ridge, none of us knew what he did. I don't think to this day any of us – I have a very clear picture of what he did. He ended up doing estimating and he was a safety engineer.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about your stepmom or – is this your mother or your stepmother?
MRS. ZUCKER: My mother was a – I came to Oak Ridge with my mother and stepfather. My father and stepmother lived that time in – well, they weren't married yet. But when they got married, they lived in New York City.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, when you came to Oak Ridge how did you arrive? Would you come by car or train?
MRS. ZUCKER: We came by car with all our worldly goods and a dog and my baby brother. And I do remember that trip because it was very hard in those days to find places to stay on the roads and we drove from Scarsdale, and I remember looking for a motel and motels were all little tiny sort of shack like structures, and I remember the night we spent in a hotel, all in one room wondering why we were coming to Oak Ridge. What was this about?
MR. HUNNICUTT: You were eleven years old at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And when you got Oak Ridge, where did you live?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we were lucky we moved right into a D house on Cedar Lane. Interestingly, it is now occupied by a friend of mine, Connie Smith, and recently I went back to that D house, and it was really fun to see how the land around it had changed.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you’re referring to D house, can you tell me what that means? What that is?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, it was built by the government specifically for people who lived in Oak Ridge. We had – a D house is three bedrooms and we had one bathroom. Some D houses had two bathrooms. We did not, but so the – when my sister was born, what was supposed to be a bathroom turned into her nursery. Our house overlooked a steep hill and there were no trees on the hill at all. It was all a mud slide, which meant that I can put my baby brother on a piece of cardboard, went down the hill and sent him flying and it was a great sport, which we both remember well.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was this the first occupants of the house?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, it was brand new?
MRS. ZUCKER: Brand new.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the year that was?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was March of 1944.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you want to come to Oak Ridge or – I know you didn't have a choice, but really did you – what was your thought about coming to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, you know the big transition for me was going from being child of divorce, which in those days was not that usual and to becoming a member of a full household with a mother and a father and a dog and a baby brother. And so our major move was here as a family unit, and so there were some very exciting about being a family unit for the first time. So in that sense I was ready to go someplace. Leaving my grandparents was excruciating because I had grown with them, they were like my parents, always lived in their house. That was very hard, but of course I went back all the time.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The neighborhood that you first moved in to on Cedar Lane, where there are other children in the neighborhood you recall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Lots, lots of children. Actually, the Cedar Lane was not quite finished when we moved there. There were still houses being built and I remember the first summer you could hear the noises of construction all around. I think within a month, all the houses were complete. But I just remember lying in the bedroom and listening to – waking up in the morning to sounds of construction every place, very different from Scarsdale, New York. Scarsdale, New York is a bedroom community for the city, very old New England kind of town and old homes, old trees, old streets, old people. In Oak Ridge everybody was young. Everything was raw so it was very different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember the mud they talk about?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure. Everybody remembers the mud. My mother cried for I think six weeks after we got here, wondering what she was doing here, but she was always a good sport – and she rallied. I think we kids thought it was sort of a crazy adventure, but I have one mud story. I’m not going to tell anymore, but my mother for a Thanksgiving; everything was rationed so she learned that you could get turkeys in Knoxville. So, she took a bus to Knoxville with a couple of friends. They went some place to get a turkey. The only turkey was a giant turkey and the only bus stop was at the bottom of a steep hill covered with mud. So my mother used to tell a story and all the neighbors tell the story of the day my mother took this giant turkey and dragged it up this hill. So when we got the turkey it was completely encased in mud, but somehow we cleaned it up and we ate it. That was our mud story. It was my mother and the turkey.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s a great story. What was the first school you attended?
MRS. ZUCKER: I attended Glenwood for just a couple of months.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then where did you go?
MRS. ZUCKER: Then we were moved to Elm Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What grade was that at Elm Grove?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the last few months of sixth grade I spent at Glenwood and then seventh grade was in Elm Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you remember some of your teacher's names?
MRS. ZUCKER: I do. I do. My main room teacher was called Maybell Stratton and she came from Strawberry Plains, Tennessee. And Alice Lyman was my music teacher. Well, that's all I can remember; that's enough. You remember Alice Lyman, that's enough.
MR. HUNNICUTT: She's an icon in the city of Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: She was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So you stayed at Elm Grove School through this?
MRS. ZUCKER: Just for seventh grade.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Seventh.
MRS. ZUCKER: And we moved to Robertsville, to Jefferson, sorry – you know how they’ve all got mixed up. We moved to Jefferson which is where Robertsville is now.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where did you live? Did you move out of Cedar – no, you went to what we call Junior High School in those days?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: But you still lived on Cedar Lane?
MRS. ZUCKER: I lived on Cedar Lane until I graduated from high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about the school at Jefferson. It was the old Wheat School at one time.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you recall it looked at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Before we got there, let me just say that all of my time in Elm Grove was spent in a portable house. The school wasn’t big enough for the population. So I went to school in a pre-fab and the whole school lot was lined up with pre-fab’s and each was an individual class. But Jefferson, well Jefferson was a great experience I must say. It was people from all over the world, all over the country, lots of different kids, lots of different kinds of thoughts and process. I think I'm a potter now and I first experienced the joy of art there with a teacher named Fannie Brennan. So, Jefferson was a lot of fun. We had a football team of sorts, I got into. I was never interested in football so I can't give you any history, but we did have – we had plays. We had a chorus and I joined the chorus and I was in musicals. So, I think in some ways that an age where a lot of your future life is formulated. It’s a good age because you’re not cowed by the social structure when you're twelve and thirteen and fourteen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How was the dress for a girl that came to Oak Ridge from another city? How was the dress different or was it different when you went to school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I think it probably was because everybody who came to Oak Ridge was poor. You have to understand that my friends were not the children of scientists.
The scientists came. They were young. They had no children as yet or they had very young children. So my friends, I guess, what might be described as blue collar workers. They came from the mountains of Virginia, from the coal mines of Tennessee; from all around this region. So, they didn't have, you know, they had no money. So dressing was I'm sure very different than it would have been in Scarsdale, New York were everybody had money so I’m sure that was different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the clothes lines at the houses were the mother hung her clothes and gathering up the housewives and the social network?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure. I don't know if it was a social network. I remember hanging clothes out. I remember from my childhood in Scarsdale we had a rotating clothes line. I loved that. I could hang on it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So what type of clothes line did you have when you came to Oak Ridge?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't know, just something that went to a post in the back yard, which you hoped did not collapse because if it did collapse, it collapsed into mud.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So how did you attach the clothes to the line?
MRS. ZUCKER: Clothes pens.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What does a clothes pen look like?
MRS. ZUCKER: I still use them. I still have wooden clothes pens and I used them to close the tops of cereal bags and roll them over and put a clothes pen on top and stuff it back in the box. So, you know. It’s a little wooden thing that goes like this, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Give me the approximate dates that you attended high school?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I graduated in 1950.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And why you were in high school, where was it located?
MRS. ZUCKER: Above Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Jackson Square being in the Townsite area?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes. I want to say something about it. I want to say something that I think is unusual and very nice. I made four girl friends in sixth grade in Elm Grove. Two of them have died, but we are still friends. They had been lifelong friends. We were lifelong friends in junior high school and high school. I don't know how many people actually have that privilege, but I still have those same friends and I really treasure that. I just had to put that in. It’s important.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up just a minute and talk a little bit about your mother’s role as a wife, housewife. What do you recall about her daily life when you weren’t at school and during the summer times and just what do you recall about daily life in the household?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, she had children who were spaced out kind of all over the place so my mother I think had – was somehow always attached to some child because she had one seven years after I was born and another sixteen years after so that – and she wasn't particularly good at that, but she did it and she did it as well as she could. She was a woman who should have had full time employment. She was a very interesting bright, well read, funny woman who was involved with everything civic that could be possibly – I think could get her out of the house. And I often think about that because I think in another era, she would have been a full time something, but she was – she wrote for the papers. She was – at one time, President of the State League of Women Voters. She was active in Planned Parenthood, went out and tramped the hills to bring, you know, reproductive information to people who were badly in need of it. And she was just a very activist person and I think she'd have been a happier person if she had had full employment and a profession of her own like many women of her age.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What newspaper did she write for?
MRS. ZUCKER: The Clinton Courier for many years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall her socializing with neighbors in the house?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, sure, sure yeah. Now, there was a lot of emphasis on drinking in Oak Ridge because it was prohibited so that made it terribly intriguing. So a lot of focus was on how you could get booze and where you could get booze in parties. I think parties featured more alcohol than any parties I've watched or experience since and I really see that the focus was there because of the prohibition. I mean it was big topic of conversation. There was a little white house down on the Oliver Springs Road. Everybody knew that. Everybody knew where they get booze. People from outside of Oak Ridge brought it in all the time. So, that was a larger part of socialization than probably was healthy.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall how they got the booze back through the gates?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, anyway they could. There was one guy at the Lab I remember had a specially fitted suitcase, but he finally got caught. But that's later history. I'm getting ahead of myself.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Very interesting. Back to your experience in high school, what clubs or if you’ve joined clubs, what were the clubs that you were affiliated with or groups? What did you do in high school, I guess, other than go to class?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I went to class as little as possible. I had a pretty bad track record. I used to go to the Public Library and read and one of the truant officers, I think he was called – used to come collect me for tests. We were good friends and he would just come to the Library door and go, “Joan-Ellen, back up the hill.” So, I was not very orthodox. I'm sorry, I just wasn't.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When you went to the Library, were you referring to the Public Library in the city?
MRS. ZUCKER: Public Library.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where was that located?
MRS. ZUCKER: That was in the Townsite area. It was part of the Rec Hall, the Ridge Rec Hall and the Ridge Rec Hall was at – just across from what was then called the Guesthouse which is now called the Alexander or the Dump, depending on how you look at it.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year – you told me before, but what year did you graduate from high school?
MRS. ZUCKER: 1950.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And then after graduation, what was your education experience?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I went to Syracuse University, did not graduate. I went to summer school at Julliard School of Music in New York for summer classes. I got married. One of the things that was surprising in my life, I think, is that I got married and stayed in Oak Ridge which was not part of my life plan, I think, but I did. I went to work; I went to work for WATO, which was the only radio station in the region at that time, affiliated with a Mutual Broadcasting System, which meant it carried baseball games all the time. I think – all I can remember is the sound of Mutual Broadcasting having nothing but baseball. Probably that’s not true.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What year was that that you and your husband got married?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we got married in 1953, and I went to work for WATO in 1952. So I was working in Oak Ridge when I met him.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let me back up a minute and talk to you about the city having been a gated city. What do you remember about that?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I thought it was wonderful because it was exciting. When you took a bus and you're twelve years old and you want to go out of the city and you have to have a badge and you get to flash a badge at a guy with a big belt and a gun; another badge. That was really good. I liked that. I suspect that without really fully understanding it, I benefited from the safety of Oak Ridge because we kids lived in the woods and we lived – we were sort of wild things all over town. When I would go from one place to the other, we always went through the woods. We always went through the board walks. We used to start – when we went to Elm Grove, we’d start at the top of California and work our way all the way to Elm Grove from two directions on boardwalks. And I'm sure people have told you about boardwalks, but they had a great sound. When you walked on a boardwalk you could hear kind of a rippling, interesting sound, and I still can hear – I mean, I can still have a memory of that sound. It was a lot of fun if you were all by yourself and needed to be moody and a teenager – they were great places for that, too. They had little bridges. They’d go hang over the bridges and watch, you know, the water. It was great. I loved living in Oak Ridge as a kid.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Tell me about riding the buses in Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: I rode the buses for fun. They were free and it was safe and so when I was about twelve years old, I just get on the bus and I ride them all over Oak Ridge. I’d ride from one end to the other and then I go through the terminal and then ride from the other end you know and you could ride for hours free. So I did that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the terminals that you’re referring to, where they were and the names of them?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, it was across from the hospital, the present hospital. A big, big terminal, lots of bus action, kind of exciting place for kid. I used to hang out in the ticket office because I had a friend there that I liked. And I have often claimed that I tried to integrate Oak Ridge single handedly. Coming from the North, I had never witness the kind of discrimination that took place in the South, and it really repelled me right away. I couldn't understand it and I couldn't stand it. So, I would try and sit at the back of the bus just arbitrarily and I remember a really devastating moment where somebody, a African-American lady came to me sat down next to me and said, “Honey, would you please not do this because when you sit back here you are threatening everybody's life.” And I remember bursting into tears and going home to my mother and saying, “How can this be? How can this exist in the world we live in?” And my mother who was a very egalitarian person with an incredible sense of fairness, I just remember all my talks with her were very – where she tried explained to me that life wasn't so good always, right? But, that was a devastating experience for me. One of my most poignant memories are being twelve years old on a bus was all the black people that had to go to the back of it and I couldn't get it. I still don't.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Talking about the buses, do you remember that when you went from one bus to the other, you have had to transfer was that incorporated in those days?
MRS. ZUCKER: You know maybe, but I don't remember it. I just remember wondering from bus to bus, right? But, you know I was twelve years old, thirteen.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when they had the gate opening to the city in March --
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I do.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Can you tell me a little bit by what you mean by that?
MRS. ZUCKER: So, what year was that, ’49, ’50? When was it?
MR. HUNNICUTT: ‘49.
MRS. ZUCKER: ‘49. Oh, yeah, I was in the parade on that day. I had – my boyfriend had a Model-A and we rode in that parade for the gate opening in his Model-A and that was a memorable moment.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall where the parade started and ended?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I remember it went through Jackson Square.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you attend any of the events other than the parade that happened in that particular day; speeches on Blankenship Field?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, I probably attended all of them. Now, you caught me off guard. Is that when the Hollywood celebrities came?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh yes, I was well involved with that. I already – I was a kid, but I was already working for WATO part-time and I remember being at the Grove Theater when there was a cowboy and a glamorous lady named, I think, Marie McDonald, and they were all drunk and I remember somebody telling me to go out – Rod somebody was his name?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Cameron.
MRS. ZUCKER: Cameron and I had go out in the back porch at the Grove, the Grove Center Rec. Hall and tell this guy that he had to come back up because he was supposed to do something, and I remember standing at the top of the steps and trying to explain to him and he had to get up because he was sitting down on the steps and he had to get up and get back wherever he was supposed to be on stage at the Grove Theater because that – the Grove Theater was the kind of the central place where a lot of Oak Ridge activity.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe that was called the Oak Terrace.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the Oak Terrace was the Grove. The Oak Terrace was there and it had a ballroom and at some point when I worked for WATO, its offices were in there and there was a restaurant down below that everybody – it was kind of the only restaurant. I mean, it had actual table cloths, I think, which were untrue of any other place to eat in Oak Grove.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall the movie star Marie McDonald? Was she really as pretty as they said she was?
MRS. ZUCKER: I guess, yeah. She was a pretty lady. She too was mostly inebriated. So how beautiful can you be? I'm sorry, this is sounding like there was a lot of drinking in Oak Ridge and you know what there really was.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, you had a young population in those days.
MRS. ZUCKER: And a young population and the Rec Halls are all worth talking about, I think because all the Rec Halls had different personalities and the Rec Hall that I hung out in was next to the Library because I lived in the Library and that was fairly staid. That had pool tables and it was a pretty good hang out. Kids could hang out there reasonably well. Some kids were better at it than others like me, but the other ones were – all had different characters like there was one I don't think most people even remember, which was across from the Playhouse, where the Playhouse is now which was then the Center Theater - Movie Theater. This was on the upper floor of the Rec Hall. I don't remember what it was called, and I don't think it lasted very long, but that was the second most dangerous place in town. That was where kind of people hung out that you didn't really want to hang out with. The most exciting place was probably Jefferson Rec Hall where the most partying went on and I remember going there and that was sort of like the wildest place, but probably wasn't that wild depends on whether you’re sixteen or not, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Were you sixteen at that time you visited the Rec Hall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh sure, a lot of us kids.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall them having bowling centers in the Rec Hall?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Bowling alleys, they were called in those days.
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah I do. I think they did. Yeah, but they were really what the word is? The thing that was so great about Oak Ridge was that Oak Ridge was a very egalitarian place. People came from everywhere and there was almost no class structure. So you just were who you were and there was, you know, we never bothered to ask what parents did or who’s what lineage people had. It was just, you were all thrown in the same pot. Nobody had much money and I have always had – just that theory in mind. I think the people that came to Oak Ridge, the working class people who came to Oak Ridge came because they were poor often. They had very few skills. There were jobs that were available that weren’t available any place else and they had a real sense of adventure. So in a sense, I have always thought of the early Oak Ridgers as people of great spirit and great adventure and courage and I had a lot of admiration and still do for a lot of those people. Most of the people I went to high school with, parents had not graduated from high school. Many of them, a few had graduated from college I would say, but most of my friends parents had never been to college. All of my friends ended up going to at least graduating high school, most of them going on to college. It was a great social leap upward for a lot of people from Tennessee and Kentucky and Alabama, all around the city and I have always had a great sense of pride about that and about the people I think really made Oak Ridge the city it was. I married a scientist so I’m not knocking the scientists, but they were young and they were concentrating on their work and a lot of people I’m describing were making a community, except for the scientists, of course, because they made the cultural community, but it was just an exciting thing to see people bloom, you know. We were 70,000 people. It's a big city.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you visit the Skating Rink in Jefferson area?
MRS. ZUCKER: No.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Not a skater?
MRS. ZUCKER: I am a non-athletic person.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, tell me about your experience working for radio stations?
MRS. ZUCKER: The radio station was the only other place of communication to disseminate information other than the Oak Ridgers. So it occupied a place in the town that I think would be hard to replicate now. It was a center of information. It was a center of activity. It was the voice of the community in many ways. When I first started working there as a teenager, I worked with a group of really creative kids and we did live broadcast. We did live broadcast of famous nobles. It shows you how arrogant we were, how presumptive we did with some of the adults to work with us like Ted Layman and Dave Jacobs, who worked there at the time and we produced dramas, radio dramas of one instance was Moby Dick. But he had guts enough to do that. I don’t know but you have to be dumb or young which we were probably both and I played the whale which meant I had a rubber tire that I ran through a bucket of water and when somebody – when Dave Jacobs would say, 'There she blows'. I will go with the water and I was the whale. So it was creative hub in many ways which is a little hard to imagine now because radio stations have zilch creativity now to do things like that.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What time of the day was that program presented?
MRS. ZUCKER: Probably by the dark of night, I don’t know; Saturdays. I think it was Saturdays. Oh, Saturday mornings, I think.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And what radio station was that?
MRS. ZUCKER: WATO.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And where were they located?
MRS. ZUCKER: They were located, there was a building called the Municipal Market building which is roughly in the area of the now defunct Downtown shopping center and we were in the back alley. One of our announcers used to call it between the green floor louver doors that entrance to the back alley and so we kind of lived in a parking lot underneath the building, underneath the grocery store.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How old are you at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Sixteen, seventeen, high school.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mention a grocery store. Do you recall any other stores in that particular building?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, I do. That building had a grocery store. We were behind the grocery store. I think that's the only other – I don't know what else was in there. Maybe a used, maybe car repair place possibly.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How about a hardware store? Do you recall a hardware store being in that building?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, Jackson Hardware may have been there originally. It moved to Jackson Square. I don't know. I don't remember a hardware store. Although I love hardware now I probably didn't love it then.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What other events did you cover? You mention the gate opening celebrities in the radio programs?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't think I really covered that. I just was hanging around, you know teenage kid who loved the radio station. Later well, I left town, came back, went back to work for WATO, and then I had a more serious role and I was a disc jockey which I loved. I thought that was fun. Disc jockeys in those days actually selected their music and I used to spend as much time choosing music as I did playing it and I can remember sitting on the floor with vinyl discs all around me, trying to decide what to play and it was fun. It was interesting. So I did a program called 'Talk of the Town', which I later did on another radio station, which I later did on a television station.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What type of music did you play?
MRS. ZUCKER: The music of the ‘50s was pretty bad in general. So it was a scramble to find good music. I play a lot of jazz because I like jazz and I used to work with the – the salesman would come in to the radio station and they would bring in new records that they were pushing. So you’d sit down with the salesman and you’d listen to the records and you talked to them about the artist and play the ones you thought were good. And I do remember that one of the artists that I felt like I discovered which is not true of course, but I discovered his records and play them a lot which was Harry Belafonte, who at that time was doing Scarlet Ribbons and some very sweet music and a lot of his music was so empty that it was –although there was a lot of big band music still around and a lot of music orchestrated by groups like Mitch Miller.
I could sing a few for you, but I won't, but it was fun choosing music and I liked the record salesman; I knew two or three of them. I think it was called Payola because they always took me for lunch. I was poor so I liked that. That didn't mean I necessarily played the records they were pushing, but I liked the lunch. The lunch was always at Service Drugstore in Jackson Square, so high-end it wasn’t. It was not high-end bribery.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In Jackson Square, where do you recall Service Drugstore was located?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, if you’re looking up the hill towards high school, it was at the far left where Big Ed’s is, next to a theater, The Ridge Theater where, I think, you could get in for nine cents.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let's go back to the records. Describe what the records look like and what they were called?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I still have some, but just large vinyl discs, the ones that we used to get from the record salesman were large vinyl discs with the bands because the 45s hadn't come out yet. So we got these big records with bands on them and you had to land your needle on the right band hopefully at the beginning. And then, you had to be right here to pick the needle at the end. So you couldn't go to the bathroom.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you do that job?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I did that oh, probably a year or so, and then I changed my focus on went into news coverage. So I was the news director of WATO for about two years and I liked that job a lot, but that had a great many difficulties because there were no women news people anywhere. So women in those days in radio, read muffin recipes and you know they didn't do serious things like news or especially local news. So that was a struggle. It was a great struggle to win respect and I was never paid as much as any of the other males on the staff. I was roughly paid half. Now, by this time I was married and I was supported and I didn't have to bum lunches from record salesmen anymore, but it really was looking back on it. It really is painful still to think about it. I was the second member of Tennessee Association of Broadcasters because the first member had a name that started with D, and I started with J, otherwise I would have been the first. So, it was not a good time for women in the broadcast field and now I am so excited to watch two moderators on national debates who are women who are smart and who are completely capable of doing this terrific job and that brings me enormous pleasure.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall who the owners of the radio station was?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I do indeed. Sam Thrower. Let's see Marsha Pengrower, trying to remember his associate. Harry Weaver. Sam Thrower was the director was the – I guess, management was the right term. -- was a salesman. I could probably…well one of the people – there was some women actually employed in WATO and one of them was Ruth Jameson and my name was Jameson and I was not related to her at all, but our names were spelled the same way so that was always a mix up. So my radio name in those days was Joan Ellen which means people were always writing to me, Dear Mrs. Ellen, but it was the only way to de-confuse us and we did very different things. She was a terrific lady, but she was very focused on domesticity and I wasn’t. So, we were very different.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You mentioned people would write to you about what? What was some of the notes they wrote to you about?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I did a program for commuters. My airtime was started at four and went to six every evening so I was on the commuter. And I got a lot of very nice little notes from men because I was a female on the air and that was something unique. And people wrote to request songs. People sometimes wrote if they liked the program. Usually they wrote more often if they didn't. Later, I worked for WOKE and we were piped in to Brushy Mountain and I used to get some really interesting mail from Brushy Mountain.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What is Brushy Mountain?
MRS. ZUCKER: Prison. It was a maximum security prison. So the guys from Brushy Mountain would write real nice notes like, “Honey, when I get out of here, I’m going to come to see you.” And that was kind of nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Probably you was hoping they wasn’t going to get out.
MRS. ZUCKER: I was hoping they wouldn't get out, and they didn't get out very often so that was okay.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Just touch a minute, so their audience would know, Brushy Mountain prison was located where?
MRS. ZUCKER: What is the town it’s was located on? Petros? Petros? Okay thanks. I'm getting cues over here. I started to say you drove this way and then this way you know.
MR. HUNNICUTT: At that time, what kind of automobile did you have?
MRS. ZUCKER: At which time?
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your first time automobile? Let's go there.
MRS. ZUCKER: Here in Oak Ridge?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, we didn't have one at first. When we first moved, we didn't have an automobile for a couple of years after we moved to Oak Ridge. I don't know. I really don't know whether that was monetary or for some other reason we all rode the bus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall going shopping with your mother to the grocery stores or stores that she went shopping?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I used to get put in line at Elm Grove Shopping Center when I was a kid and I would hold a place for my mother and until the lines – the lines were very long because everything was rationed especially for cigarettes, which everybody smoked then and so I would hold a place with the line and then call my mother from the payphone, or from the phone on the desk in McGinley’s Drugstore and she would then come down. This is after we had a car. She would come down and grocery shop, but you know she – it has a deal. I think I got paid like ten cents to do that, to hold the line for her and – well, all my friends did that too on Saturday morning so, a whole bunch of us – the people from the Elm Grove region. We would all cluster around on, you know, in front of the grocery store and wait until we got to the end of the line and you can take turns and read the magazines.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was Elm Grove the most frequent grocery store she visited?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah.
MR. HUNNICUTT: You stood in line for?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yeah, yeah. It was the closest to where we lived.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your mother went shopping or I presumed she took your sister?
MRS. ZUCKER: My sister was born when I was in high school. I don't know what she did with my sister. I carried my sister every place. I liked her a lot.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Very interesting. Where did you meet your husband?
MRS. ZUCKER: On a double date here in Oak Ridge. By that time, my parents had moved to Norris. They moved to Norris after I graduated from high school. So when I met my husband, I was working for Miller's Department Store in Knoxville. He was working at the Lab and I lived in Norris. So what I remember mostly about our very brief courtship was that mostly we're in a car going like this from one place to the other.
I met him on a double date, but the first we were, became, I think, interested in each other was at an Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Coffee Concert in the Library, or in the Ridge Rec Hall. So, we had I think our first – the spark was lit at that point.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How long did you work for Miller’s in Knoxville?
MRS. ZUCKER: A little over a year.
MR. HUNNICUTT: What was your job duties?
MRS. ZUCKER: I was called Fashion Coordinator. I got the job because I was broke and I couldn't find a radio job and I knew a guy in Knoxville, who knew the guy in Miller’s, who got me this job working for – you saw Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada? Well, that’s the woman I worked for, and she was the Fashion Coordinator and they really hired me because I could write the fashion monologues and deliver them. So what I did was, you know, I was the speaker for a lot of fashion shows.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So, how did you get back and forth from Norris to Knoxville?
MRS. ZUCKER: Carpool with other people from Norris. I used to eat breakfast in the drugstore. For thirty-five cents you can get two eggs, toast and coffee at the drugstore which I think was a –you know it wasn't a Drugstore, it was a five-and-dime down the street. And I also – some of my memories of Knoxville were kind of fun because we little girls used to dress ourselves if we were lucky from Lerner’s and Lerner’s, who was on Gay Street then. You could go to Lerner’s; you could get pretty cheap dresses that were pretty and cheap. So we would form a little group and go in by bus with our money to buy dresses at Lerner’s and I also took voice lessons from the only voice teacher that I know of in the region and she – her studio was right at the end of the old Market Square and so it had windows that opened up to the Market Square because nobody had air-conditioned and I would sing Italian songs to all the geezers out there selling, you know, fish and pork ears and whatever. And I can still remember all these guys kind of popping in their galluses and staring up at the thing and I could stand in front and wave while I sang like this so my voice teacher wouldn't see me. But, you know that was still on the days when they brought the produce in with mules. It was a neat place. I often think they missed the boat when they didn't somehow keep some of that feeling up. But, Market Square is still fun.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you play a musical instrument?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, I was always interested in voice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, you met your husband on a blind date; do you recall where that was? Where that took place?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, we went out on the lake. I was dating. He was dating the cousin of the guy I was dating and we all went out on his boat. My husband had just bought a boat so we went out on his boat. My husband always claims that he bought that boat in order to entrance women and he married the first one he ‘tranced. So that was kind – I don't know if he got his money’s worth. He got a long marriage out of that. We’re still married.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I believe he did well.
MRS. ZUCKER: Almost sixty years.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Where were the some places you went when you dated?
MRS. ZUCKER: Dated my husband or dated other people?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes. Well, let's go back to when you dated other people.
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, there was a road house out on Clinton Highway called Patton [inaudible] and Patton [inaudible] was good because you could really dance there. It had good dance fans and so that was one of my favorite places to go. You could spend a whole evening I think you know one beer and a lot of dancing and I loved to dance. So, a lot of my dates, we would go to Patton [inaudible]. There wasn’t much place to go in Oak Ridge. I've always loved classical music so I went to a lot of concerts. I was, you know, I had been associated one way or another with the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Corp since I was sixteen and I'm still on the board. So, I mean like how long can you be trapped by one organization? But, I love classical music. I love live classical music. I love any kind of live music.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall a drive-in called the Snow White Drive-in?
MRS. ZUCKER: Of course, of course, we used to broadcast there. Ted Laymen did a live broadcast from the Snow White, I think, every Saturday night and he had a little booth there and he, you know, he fielded records. Ted is an interesting character and if you could interview him, you would enjoy that. He was very active in the Playhouse. As a kid, I took Junior Playhouse and I sang with the Oak Ridge Chorus. You asked about high school. I made jokes about it, but I think what I mostly did in high school was I did a lot of art work in high school. I decorated gyms. I decorated things. I had a lot of energy, not all academically directed, but I was very good at extracurricular – majored in it as a matter of fact, and I didn't belong to clubs because I didn't approve of clubs. So I actually made an enemy of the sororities because I didn't feel they should be able to use school facilities and at the same time black ball students so that made me very unpopular at times.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Let's talk a little bit about some more about the Snow White Drive-in. You mentioned you broadcast from there. Describe what that drive-in looked like the best you can remember.
MRS. ZUCKER: Gosh. Garish lighting, an overly bright lighting like a Hopper painting, long metallic kind of counter with high chairs that – they may have been some low chairs and tables, but I don't recall it. I just recall the counter and big parking lot always full, orders taking at the car. It was the place to go in many ways. I mean even after my husband and I got married, it was still a place to go for breakfast. You know a Snow White breakfast was kind of a tradition. It was enormous and you know full of the good things that are bad for you. There was one lady I remember there. I don’t remember her name, but she was a kind of strong looking red-headed lady with the big loud voice and I wish I remembered her name, but she was kind of a fixture like at the Snow White and –.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Was she the cashier?
MRS. ZUCKER: I don't remember. I really don't remember. I used to go there and hand Ted Laymen records. You know and so my function usually was there was an abject to the radio station.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall around the ceiling perimeter where molding would go, there’d be Snow White and her little Dwarf pictures?
MRS. ZUCKER: Sounds right. You can't prove by me.
MR. HUNNICUTT: I remember that.
MRS. ZUCKER: You remember that?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Yes.
MRS. ZUCKER: Okay, well I'm not going to argue with you. It certainly sounds like – I know it did have a big neon wrap around of some kind.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Snow White Drive-in is a kind of an icon in Oak Ridge. There's not any pictures of the drive-in.
MRS. ZUCKER: There are no pictures? How funny, gosh.
MR. HUNNICUTT: So I always ask about the Snow White to give information about how the Snow White worked.
MRS. ZUCKER: Right. Well, I just remember it was the grand social center of Oak Ridge for a while. For me, the center of Oak Ridge was often, I guess, Ridge Rec Hall because that was where I met some very interesting people there. For one thing, a lot of the people in Oak Ridge especially a lot of men, young men had been in the service and came back and we had a lot of people in the high school that were ex-service men especially the Navy because I think the Navy took people very young. So, we had people returning to high school that had been in World War II and right after we graduated in ‘50, a lot of our guys went to Korea so we were pretty involved with war. In high school, there was a group called, gosh, I wish I remember. It was a group focused on peaceful uses of the atom. I wasn’t a member of it, but many of my friends were and they were concerned about the future – this is after the bomb. They are concerned about the future of a world with these huge weapons. So, there was a very interesting group of young people there who were concerned about those issues. You know, the high school was quite a mix because it was a big football school. We had a lot of good teams and they were state champions in many ways. We had wonderful players like Buddy Pope and B.B. Hopkins were kind of notable players in the region, but we also had a great debating team and we also won of all kinds’ championships from music. Our chorus won a lot and I sang with the chorus.
MR. HUNNICUTT: In 1945, I can't remember; were you too young to remember the dropping of the bomb in the celebration?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I actually was not here. I was in Nantucket Island when it was dropped, with my father. I always lived a double life because my parents – my father and his wife lived in urban areas. My father lived in Washington during World War II and so I went to Washington quite frequently during my youth and then I also went to New York quite frequently and then I went on vacations with that side of my family to a lot of Northeastern vacation spots so I was very lucky in that regard. I had a wonderful group of experiences that were totally separate from Oak Ridge. But I was in Nantucket Island on vacation and I can't remember exactly. There was a moment in my living room when somebody mentioned and somebody who shouldn't have mentioned something about making weapons and – a neighbor and my stepfather wrestled him out of the house really fast and walked him down the street and I don't remember anything more than that. But I did get the idea that we were making weapons. So my father who was a newspaper man came in and he said, “Something big happened in Oak Ridge” and I said, I don't remember this at all, but my father said I said, 'Oh, you mean they made that big bomb. The big bomb we made?” totally out of the blue. So my father was absolutely amazed. He thought I really knew something and I never disabused him because I like the idea of his thinking I knew something. So, I didn't really, you know I just had heard enough and I think although it was supposed to be super secret. I think there were very few people in Oak Ridge that didn't feel we were making weapons of some kind. Of course, nobody anticipated the horror of what we were actually making, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Now, let's switch forward a little bit about you met your husband and you got married. Did you have children?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes, we had three. Yeah, we have three. We have three daughters: Rebecca and Claire and Susanna.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And they went through the Oak Ridge School system?
MRS. ZUCKER: They did.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Do you recall when they went through the school system versus when you went through the school system, how different or was it different at that time?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, I think it was different. For one thing, they went through the school system with the children of other scientists. So I think they had a different social experience than I did. As I’ve I describe before, I think I went through school where a lot of people who were upwardly mobile, who had come from pretty impoverished backgrounds, who didn't have a lot of educational background, and I think our school was good and I think it was a huge effort was made to bring in the best possible teachers to Oak Ridge. So the educational opportunities for those people were very good, but the competition was very difficult. My kids went to a much more highly intellectually competitive school. They were up against really well educated kids from well-educated backgrounds who were already smarter than somewhat when out there, when they were born and so their competition was tough I think. It suited my children differently. I mean my children are different as are all children. So my artist child didn't have a very good time because there wasn't a focus on the kinds of things she cared about. My scientific child had a much better time, was better able to compete and my oldest daughter I think had a very good social experience because she was a very kind of sociable warm person. So they all had different experiences, but I think the schools became tougher, and certainly in some areas, and I'm just guessing, but I think they became a little more classified. I mean, I think that there was a little more gap when my kids went to school between the less fortified – the kids were less fortified at home than the kids who were more fortified at home, in terms of home stimulation. And I think there was a bigger class gap when my kids went to school than it was when I did. But all of my kids are glad that they grew up in Oak Ridge because all of my kids have said at some point or another that they like the mix of people, especially, I think, in housing.
I mean, if you look at an Oak Ridge street, growing up in the war, and even after the war, because of the differences in house sizes, what you got was a big mix of people and you know nobody could buy their way into big house when I was growing up. So you just kind of –although it is interesting that all the F houses, which are the largest houses seemed to belong to the Army brass. There was something going on there. I now live in an F house and it’s funny because I still think of it as an upper class house even though I live in old Oak Ridge. It’s because of my perception – this house I live in now was owned by Colonel Britain who was with, you know, one of the Army guys that ran Oak Ridge, so I looked at it – and I used to go there as a visitor when I was growing up. So I still think, you know, “Man, I've got an F house”, right? It's hard to explain that elite feeling to anybody else that just looks at it as a cemesto, right?
MR. HUNNICUTT: Well, when you first got married, what was your first house you lived in?
MRS. ZUCKER: We lived in the little apartments across from Downtown, the E apartments and then my husband first lived in the condemned apartments on Highland Avenue, and he wanted to get out of those so badly that he told the Lab if he didn't get a better apartment he’d leave. They got him a little bit bigger apartment, an E apartment. So we moved in there, and then we moved into a Garden Apartment like almost everybody we knew, started out in a Garden Apartment.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The first apartment was the brick apartment?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: It’s still over there today. Then you moved to the Garden Apartment, did you live in the ones that faced the Turnpike, or did you live in the three story block ones behind?
MRS. ZUCKER: We lived in the three story block ones. We had the woods behind us, which was nice.
MR. HUNNICUTT: The first apartment, can you explain, or do you remember how it looked inside?
MRS. ZUCKER: Oh, yes. I think to this day it was a really well-designed apartment. They had black vinyl floors which were not great; kind of sank in when you walked in because it was so dark. They had a small, but very well-constructed kitchen. Still do, I'm sure. A living room-dining room combination, two bedrooms, a very spacious bathroom. In fact, when we could afford one, we put our washing machine in the bathroom. They had a basement cubicle where you could store things, except our neighbors used them to play poker because his wife wouldn’t let him play in the apartment. So he had it all set up for his poker guys and with couches. So, we all commandeered those for various purposes.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Would you describe the Garden Apartment?
MRS. ZUCKER: That’s what I was describing.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Oh, what about the Woodland brick?
MRS. ZUCKER: You know, we lived there a very short time. It was very tiny, small bedrooms, small living room, tiny little table. I don't even remember the kitchen, but I just remember wanting to get out of it. It was not a great place to live.
MR. HUNNICUTT: When your children were born, where did you live?
MRS. ZUCKER: I live then and live now on Orange Lane, 103 Orange Lane. I've lived there since 1959, the same house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: That's an F house?
MRS. ZUCKER: That's an F house. Much remodeled now, but still an F house.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Describe what a F house looks like?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, the F house was the biggest of the cemesto houses and originally, it had three bedrooms with a fairly large living room and a separated dining room and a screened porch and a long skinny kitchen which we got rid of as soon as we could and a utility room, one bathroom. We had remodeled our house many times and now it has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, three bathrooms, actually, a large kitchen with a room next to it. We call it a TV room, and a basement where my potting studio is.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Did you work during any of the time while you were married?
MRS. ZUCKER: Yes. Well, I worked at the radio station and then I worked at the cable station; Tennessee cable station Channel 12 that preceded this Channel 12. I worked there for six years. I did all kinds of things, but I ran a television interview show. I was in the other seat, the one you’re occupying and I did a daily show for four and a half, almost five years. I don't know how I did that. It was so much work, but I had more energy then. I mean, I look back on it and I think, “My God, how did I do that every day?” Oh gosh, it was so hard – very rewarding. It was like I used to say it was kind of like a license to kill because so many interesting people came through my life that way. I made so many friends through that program and so many wonderful acquaintances. It felt like at that time in my life, I really understood my community. I don’t understand it that well now. I loved that job.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Touch a little bit about what your husband's profession was?
MRS. ZUCKER: My husband’s a physicist. He immigrated to this country before World War II broke out from Yugoslavia because his life was in danger. So he and his family made it to New York as immigrants. He got into the New York City school system, went to Stuyvesant High School, which is a free school and a top school in New York. Got to the University of Vermont with a GI Bill like so many other really smart people in our society today and went to Yale Graduate School and then came here. He worked in the Electro-nuclear Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and became an Associate Director and then was, for brief time, Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He's quite a guy. Great father; great grandfather; great, great, great uncle; great, great, three-greats.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How many grandchildren do you have?
MRS. ZUCKER: We have seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren and two great, great-grandchildren on the way, twins.
MR. HUNNICUTT: Does your children live in Oak Ridge or they –?
MRS. ZUCKER: No, one lives in Tucson, one lives in Asheville, and one lives in Knoxville.
MR. HUNNICUTT: How do you see the city of Oak Ridge today versus how it was when you came? How has it changed, in your opinion?
MRS. ZUCKER: Well, I’m very concerned about it and the most marked difference that I see, how do I put this? I'm disappointed in the fact that so many people have moved outside of Oak Ridge. You know, we all make jokes about the Pellissippi Parkway having destroyed Oak Ridge. People started to move out and as they moved out, I think, unfortunately, a lot of the people that care about the institutions I care about which are cultural institutions, they moved their interest in the culture to Knoxville. So, we have organizations that were founded by bright, young, you know, terrific people sixty years ago. Those same people are still trying to run those organizations because people who have the same concerns and interests are now living in West Knoxville. And that to me is terribly sad because we have institutions in this town now, that are just hanging on by the thread. I worked a lot with the Oak Ridge Symphony and Oak Ridge Civic Music Association, and to get young people to go to the concerts is difficult. It’s always been difficult. But the kind of young people we had in Oak Ridge sixty years ago started those institutions and now that kind of person is living in West Knoxville. So, I think that's sad, and I attribute some of my disappointment to a lack of energy in that direction by our employers. I, for instance, do not think Oak Ridge National Laboratory puts the same emphasis on city support by its employees. I'm not talking about giving money to things. I'm talking about supporting local institutions. I don't think there’s enough emphasis by the Lab put on, you know, your civic responsibility to the community that we have built here and that makes me sad. It really makes me very sad. I want to go out there and say, “Look, you know this a great place. We need to keep it great and your energy’s going in seven other directions.” So, I’m sad about that, and I’d like to do something about it, but you know, I'm a little old to do something about everything. When you get to be eighty years old, you have to say to yourself, “Well, do I want to start something new at this point or do I want to take a nap?” And the nap wins, two out of three times, right? So, you can't do it anymore and you shouldn't do it anymore. That's another reason. You know, I should be replaced on things that I've been doing. We should all be replaced. Replace me, you know?
MR. HUNNICUTT: It's been a great pleasure to interview you, and I think that this interview will be a help to a future person that might want to write a thesis or some story about Oak Ridge, but you've contributed a lot of information about Oak Ridge.
MRS. ZUCKER: Thanks.
MR. HUNNICUTT: And I thank you very much.
MRS. ZUCKER: It is a lot of fun. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Thank you.
[End of Interview]